The City: Perverted for Free
by Dirk Lefever

“The traveler has set off once again, leaving the country for strange and unknown cities. Unlike the average tourist, he has bought a city map before starting on the journey. As this traveler makes his way, we no longer wonder about him. It is the tourist, the unprepared traveler, who catches our eye when he is desperately searching the place for a newspaper stand or tourist info which come with every airport or railway station. Once he has found the one or the other, he buys a map - or, better still - gets one for free. At this moment he already feels like having the city in his pocket. A basic trust in that map our tourist holds in his hands nestles in, since it is his only reference to a knot which until then cannot be unraveled but nevertheless spreads itself out as “town” before his eyes. However, is this map to be trusted? Is it as purely denotative as the unwary tourist believes? The map appears to be a neutral object but in more than one aspect it is not. Once a map becomes a real object, instead of a sign, any notion of neutrality has completely vanished. It is being determined by its ideal; by the basic trust the user bestowes it with and the accaparation of the semiosis the map has put into action; by producers that would love to see the relationship between the elements in this particular semiosis to be reversed. If the tourist desires to be more than the tourist one wants him to be, it is necessary for him to reach the insight that the map, first as sign and second as object, makes the city disappear … And if so, suppose we can make the tourist aware of these (semiotic) processes, does he want this to happen? Is it not easier to discover an unknown city in just a delusional way?”

Photo from Stephen Gill’s Lost In London series